Climate change is a national security threat! Wait, do we want to make that argument?

Bryan Bender has a fairly sophisticated article in today's Boston Globe about the matter of global warming as a "national security" issue. Senator Kerry, among others, has been pushing this, in part as an argument to try to get more senators on board with the climate bill. And the Pentagon itself has been paying more and more attention to the issue.

But, um, we shouldn't be all imperialist about it.

Here's how Matt Yglesias articulates it in the blog post Bender refers to:

This talk of climate change as a national security threat has a bit of a whiff of hubristic imperialism about it as I don’t think it makes a ton of sense to look at every possible instance of drought, famine, mass migration, civil conflict, and human tragedy abroad as a “threat” to the United States per se. That said, human tragedy is still pretty tragic and anything to help draw attention to the fact that “climate change” means honest-to-god major problems and not just somewhat warmer weather is useful.

So where does that leave us? Global warming is leading to or is going to lead to a wide variety of problems, including international conflicts. That's a bad thing. Those conflicts may or may not have an effect on you, but either way, not good. And while it's good to think about planning for that reality, it's much better and more important at this very moment to focus on stopping the problem in the first place.